Buy Nothing Day 2008

The project I am going to talk about now was based heavily, if not entirely on typography and layout and the power of type within graphic design.

For me typography plays a very important role in my design style, I am a very big fan of using type itself as the imagery and focus of a piece of work. Not in the sense that you just spell out your message but in an artistic manner which uses the forms of the letters rather than just using them to construct words.

By positioning them to work with each other you can produce a fantastic piece of work which not only contains all the relevant information but attracts the eye of the viewer by being inventive and experimental.

The Buy Nothing Day project involved working

with type alone to work towards and produce a poster advertising either FOR or AGAINST Buy Nothing Day (an event organised by AdBusters, www.adbusters.org).

To begin with, as in any project, I sketched out letter forms and experimented with all sorts of ideas such as cutting and pasting them to create new forms, tracing and over-laying and looking at ways in which letters interact with one another.

Before I could get anywhere near to creating a poster, I had to research the event and AdBusters to get a feel for their brand name and what they aim to do. I found most all of their a

dvertising material used bright colours which unfortunately I could not use as this project had to have a black and white outcome.

However this made the outcome fresh especially for their usual methods of design.

The brief explained how the poster had to be fully typographic with no images used which gave the project a new angle as I'd never worked purely with type before. This gave me an opportunity as mentioned before to create imagery out of the type itself.

I explored ideas using different angles and positioning, different sizes and weights of letters to design and put together something fresh and slightly out of the ordinary.

I established a hierarchy of elements and put them in order of importance, I then used the sizes of the words to indicate this order to draw attention from the viewer in a particular way as you can see in my final outcome below.

Femme Fatal

Right, well I didn't post as often as I would have liked these last few weeks, but this is party due to my mac having to be sent away to be repaired. All done now though so its time for the rest of the work to be exhibited.

This project involved as I have mentioned before, taking two existing companies and merging them to create a new hybrid for which we had to design appropriate material for.

The companies given to our particular group was the 'Magic Circle' (the UK's biggest magic society) and 'Agent Provocateur' (a very high class lingerie boutique).

We began to brainstorm initially creating mood boards, basically clipping and drawings and anything else we could find relating to our given and similar companies or areas. Our idea ended up being a store that would sell sexy outfits and clothing specifically for the entertainment business, i.e magicians assistants etc.

The main focus as with any new company was the logo. Logo's are essential when creating a branding for a company and will always be what sticks in the minds of the clients/customers. We went through a huge variety of hand drawn ideas before moving into illustrator and through a rather long process we came up with something which was both simple and elegantly appealing at the same time.

With the logo finished we moved onto product branding and looking at ideas for packaging designs and advertising material. I arranged a photo shoot with a friend to be used as a model for advertisement that would feature in magazine spreads, like you would see in Vogue etc.

As for packaging we designed and produces wraps for boxes and an example carrier bag in the classic brown bag style.

The one thing I myself found difficult in this project was working as part of a team. Ofcourse it had its advantages, like more interesting ideas and getting an idea of how others around you worked and their styles. But our particular group seemed to have more people who would put in considerably less effort, this may have been to do with them thinking they couldn't do it as good, I don't know, but it made it harder for the couple of us who put in all the effort to make the project successful. But I guess as they say, 'if you want to do something right, do it yourself'.

The rest of the roll

This is the second instalment of my tape project posts which will talk about a couple of other pieces including what was used as the final outcome, which in my opinion could have been much improved.

Below is another version of the piece last shown in my prior post, however this blue version is making use of the negative space around the letters leaving the lettering itself to become negative in the sense of colour.

This is my personal favourite of the two as I am a big fan of white typography on colour or black backgrounds.

Here is my example of a little project we did which involved using the tape as a material in which to wrap an object. As you can see below I went down the ironic and somewhat childish route of taping up... you guessed it, a roll of tape! In fact I found this a lot of fun and I think the irony adds a huge amount to the piece. Although the shape is a bit boring and there is little skill involved in producing it, the idea as a whole comes off as a success and even evokes some humour, which I always love.

The final example in this post is my final piece for this project. Going back to the theme of equality I explored the equality of colour and black and negative space within a piece of work.

Looking at the work of Piet Mondrian greatly inspired this work, however I think i have too closely resembled my work to his which is why I feel it is not a very powerful piece.

In the future when first looking at examples of work by other artists I'll see how I can try to incorporate their style without almost copying it completely. Other than that as my main criticism I feel the piece reflects the rest of my body of work, it just needs a bit more thought on the composition and overall outcome.

In my next post I'll be talking about a group project involving creating and re-branding a hybrid company to suit new ideas and practises. This involved creation of all sorts of things from a corporate logo to advertising material and packaging examples. See you soon!

Tape and more tape

I'd like to share with you the first project I underwent at Uni, which as you may have guessed from the title... involves tape, and lots of it.

Throughout my own personal exploration of the project I looked at the word 'equality' and used numerous techniques which incorporated this theme in anything from layout, to subject matter.

The piece below was one of my first experiments with tape and exploring how it can be used considering its properties, for example it's easiest to apply in clean cut straight lines. This piece is also looking at the interaction of colour and pattern and how both work together. The angled lines, especially the red and black are very similar to that of many posters designed by the Russian Constructivists which always gave a sense of direction and purpose.

Here I have continued the theme of black and red using very bold straight lines trying to harmonise the way they interact with one another, this piece reminded me very much of Piet Mondrians work, the black lines making squares that encase the red within. This could symbolise the inequality between the black and the red, although the red dominates in terms of size, the black is still the controlling element.

This experiment involved using the tape as more of a material now rather than an influence. Parts of this were difficult as the tape is naturally straight edged, but for this instance I needed to create curved forms so I had to carefully pleat the edges to follow the curves of the letters. Which you may have already guessed make up the word 'eqaulity'. This piece I find most aesthetically pleasing of the 3 as it makes good use of both the positive and negative space and could be seen as an abstract as well as a structured piece of design.

That is all I have to share with you today, but I will continue this project in my next post. As I mentioned before it was my first on of the year and so is not as strong as my later work, but I hope you enjoy it all the same.

Down to business

Ok so that was a bit of an immature opening post, so allow me to redeem myself now by saying that I have created this blog to share with you, the viewers, the experiences ideas and outcomes of a second year Graphic Design student. Me.

Throughout the coming weeks, months and possibly years as I develop further, I want to use this space to exhibit my creative processes and work that I have produced during (and outside of) my learning days at Sheffield Hallam University.

I am not sure just yet how often I will update the blog, but my aim is for a few times each week and to build up a showcase of work for anybody who is interested in how the mind of a design student may work.

As of now it will mainly include work produced during my first year, but as time goes by I hope to expand out and be sharing with you my experience throughout my degree years.

The Beginning

I am now an established presence on the world wide web, a follower in all things that involve updating statuses and sharing with people photographs of my experiences through different stages of my life...

Lets get started!